Content Migration Strategy

We like a challenge at Vamosa, so when a major pharmaceutical company contacted us recently to discuss migrating their entire Intranet portal we were immediately interested. This was an ‘all or nothing’ situation for the customer, as both an internal project team and the CMS vendors themselves had already tried and failed to migrate the sites.

These previous failures didn’t scare us off however and actually made us keener to prove to the customer that Vamosa software and Expert Services consultants could actually achieve what they were beginning to think was impossible.

Being confident in our abilities, we agreed to deliver a two week proof of concept to demonstrate that we could move content, digital assets, metadata, portal navigation, portal structure, portlet placement and security (i.e. everything!) from the existing source system to a new target. The content, currently stored within Interwoven TeamSite with a WebLogic Portal front end, was moving to a new Oracle Publisher CMS with WebCenter Interaction as the portal front end.

The PoC was difficult, as we were pushing the boundaries of what was previously considered part of a content migration and literally creating an entire portal – with content and structure – automatically from scratch. So, a difficult two weeks, but ultimately very successful, leading to some gasps of amazement from the internal technical team when we ran through the whole process over a WebEx meeting. Needless to say, we won the piece of work for the full Intranet migration.

And then the next challenge: because so much time had been spent trying to figure it out before Vamosa became involved, there was very little time left to actually migrate the Intranet portal before the proposed go live date! Luckily we have years of experience in delivering content migrations to very strict deadlines, so were able to plan an approach with the customer and successfully execute the migration of 18 large sites on schedule and with a content freeze measured in hours rather than days.

This type of migration, very complex and with tight timescales, is only possible using the power and flexibility of Vamosa Content Migrator. Other migration frameworks can’t cope with this level of complexity and are restricted to moving only the CMS content and normally in quite an inefficient way. Content Migrator uses the core APIs of the target web portal and CMS and as a result achieves high performance through a reliable and secure interface provided by the portal and CMS vendors.

So, the moral of the story is: don’t be scared of a challenge, confront it head on with the right team and nothing is impossible!







Download the 'Content Migration: Seven Steps to Success' White Paper to further understand the steps required to achieve a successful migration project.